Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD

A young cinephile I know sat me down with him to watch two new DVD releases: Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Pierrot le fou (1965). As he’d apprised me, the films were curiously related. Not only had the writers of Bonnie, David Newman and Robert Benton, set out to emulate the sensibility of French New Wave films; their screenplay proved so congenial to the sources of its inspiration that an admiring François Truffaut passed it on to an amenable Jean-Luc Godard, who entered negotiations to film it. These of course weren’t successful, but when Newman and Benton later mused—sometimes with Godard himself—on what, as they put it, “Bonnie and Clyde might have been had he directed it,” they imagined it would have been “not unlike Pierrot le fou,” Godard’s film about another couple on the run made only a year after the Bonnie deal fell through. Such information, like the ebullient young man who imparted it, charmed me considerably: could the proposed double feature fail to stimulate? For all our difference of age and sensibility, I too was a cinephile, and because of that same difference, I had confidence in us as a team; once we had warmed up with the child’s play of finding Godard’s example in Bonnie, we would easily advance to the trickier fun of spotting traces of Bonnie’s influence on Pierrot, a film that preceded it by two years. And then, who knew?

But somehow, for so suggestive a pairing, we weren’t after all a good pair. To begin with, my companion, though a mere fledgling, displayed a near-perfect command of Bonnie, not only its every scene and image, but even its making, marketing, and critical reception; and he expatiated on everything from the oral sex to Pauline Kael with the same stultifying effect on me as the self-adoring infomercials that Warner Bros., calling them “documentaries,” had put on a separate disc. Without question, Bonnie was still all he remembered from the last and only time he saw it, but that very fact reduced my own viewing of it to no more than he remembered; I assented to his every point, engaged with none. The awkwardness between us only increased when we moved on to Pierrot. For now, continuing to pervert the conversational obligation to “take turns,” but in the opposite way, he fell into a sort of abashed silence, which he maintained unbroken throughout the film’s most extraordinary moments; despite his boast to have first caught Pierrot at a small cinéma d’essai in the Latin Quarter, I began to wonder whether he had ever seen this film. It was, in any case, impossible to doubt that he was deferentially waiting for me to take the lead here, as he had just done with Bonnie. But I couldn’t, being rather in need of some assistance myself; and if I had nothing to add to his garrulity before, I had nothing to put forward now in our deadeningly silent home theater.

As the young man was none other than myself, or rather the earlier self that I had been when I saw these films in the 1960s, it was troubling that he should have turned out to be so unsatisfactory. As Brice Parain told Anna Karina in My Life to Live (1962), “When you’re twenty, you don’t know … To be completely at one with what you love, you need maturity.” This had been a convenient assumption as much for the young man whom it first allowed to watch art films in total incomprehension as for his middle-aged successor whom it subsequently authorized to find consolation for grizzled hair in a well-judging head. But this time around, things had fallen out to the exact contrary: my callow youth proved surprisingly adequate to the task of understanding Bonnie, whereas my wise ripeness kept me gaga when it came to getting Pierrot. Had I waited forty years to learn that, in the first case, I did know at twenty, and that, in the second, I would never know? By virtue of being either too good or too faulty, my memory had cruelly stripped both films of depth. With Bonnie, it turned up little more than the rote memorization of a student good at cramming; and with Pierrot, it had sagged into out-and-out amnesia, the lapse of a dotard who was now forgetting his keys, his glasses, everything. Nothing could have been less Proustian than this strange commemorative experience that, in its very flatness, didn’t feel like “experience” at all; instead, it had deprived me of a sense of my own depth along with the films’. Crowded out between two forms of mental superficiality—all-knowing adolescence and mindless senility—I had lost the very possibility of the just-right subjectivity (psychologically deep, aesthetically confirmed, erotically complete) that, under the name of maturity, Parain had promised me.

My failure to see in Bonnie anything I hadn’t seen in 1967 may be recast in less personal terms, as an effect of the film’s own antivisual bias. This might seem a preposterous claim to make about a Hollywood movie that devotes obvious effort to being easy on the eyes: the good looks of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, the 1930s costumes and locations, Arthur Penn’s theatrical framings—these things have been plainly designed to procure us immediate visual pleasure, and they do. But such pleasure is “obvious” in the root sense as well: it is in the way, at once obstructive and preemptive. If we are instantly gratified in remarking Bonnie’s many notable “sights,” that is because (albeit more or less unconsciously) we instantly recognize them; hence, no sooner do we lay eyes on them than we essentially stop seeing them. Our pleasure is a sort of relief at being spared the strain, the intensity, the exorbitance inherent in visual excitation, and at finding that excitation pacified under the sedation of the déjà vu. Bonnie is packed solid, so to speak, with familiar icons, from pictures of FDR to Philip Morris ads; and the better to make its images always-already reminiscent, it frequently resorts to “antiquing” techniques, introducing its protagonists in black-and-white snapshots, or shooting Bonnie’s family reunion through hazy window screen.

During one of the infomercials, Morgan Fairchild says of the faces in that reunion: “they look just like they’re right out of a Grapes of Wrath 1932 photograph.” This is pure eye-wash, but as such it is telling: what matters is that the déjà vu be easily recognized, not accurately; and indeed, the more vaguely we remember the icons of Grant Wood, Norman Rockwell, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, John Ford, or John Steinbeck, the more effectively the film drains from them the blood to pump life into its phantom replications. Everything looks “just like it’s right out of” something we can’t quite name, but it would decidedly spoil the effect if an improved memory were to recall that Bonnie’s trend-setting beret has been lifted from Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy (1949), or that what is perhaps the film’s most admired image—of a bank clerk seen through a car window as Clyde is shooting him—is modeled on an image from Potemkin (1925).

As if to forestall some such suggestion that Bonnie were anything other than original, its collaborators concur in recalling a magical, propitious creativity. Here is the costume designer Theadora van Runkle on her inspiration: “the minute I read the first page [of the script] … I knew, I saw every-thing.” And here is Dunaway on the result: “The minute I saw it, I knew this was right.” We too enjoy this amazing speed and range of vision in our humble capacity as Bonnie’s spectators: having seen everything before, we see it again “at once” and in its obvious “rightness.”

There is a single exception to the film’s practice of visual habituation, only one thing that induces rapid movement in our icon-glazed eyes. This is Dede Allen’s editing, whose irregular hiccups keep breaking the spell of Penn’s immobilizing tableaus and silhouettes with, at least for a while, some of the recklessly destructive energy of the protagonists themselves. Allen’s work was called iconoclastic and it literally remains so, shattering the images by breaking up the tranquil, predictable flow required for their coalescence. This New Wave style of editing would soon become no more French than the baguettes on which, during the same period of assimilation, we were learning to make turkey sandwiches; but in Bonnie, at least, the contradiction it introduces is so serious as to require a full-on spectacle of resolution. In the same moment that the narrative tension comes to catharsis with Bonnie and Clyde’s violent death, the formal antagonism is being resolved in the film’s most spectacular—and transmissible—stylistic innovation: violence in slow motion. This device, which moralizing critics once censured for reveling in the violence, in fact does the very opposite; it abandons the iconoclasm of montage for a smoother, almost velvety transition between images, images that, in pointed contrast to the blood being splattered in them, now seem to be congealing. Bonnie is ridden with bleeding holes while Bonnie lyrically affirms its visual consolidation. The quick, staccato rhythm now belongs only to the feds’ guns as the film’s own pace is slowed down into a picture-pretty memento of what it had been; the editing has got “antiqued” along with everything else. Bonnie’s innovation thus consummates the film’s very retro-ness, as a movie made in full anticipation of the nostalgia that it might one day occasion and is actually occasioning from the start. “You will remember Bonnie and Clyde,” the film seems to be predicting with every image, “and you will remember how good it used to look.” But the course of time, instead of making this prophecy easier to fulfill, has made it simply impossible: “I can’t; I remembered that already.”

Pierrot’s heroine, called Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), is shown standing next to a postcard of a Jean Renoir portrait, her hair done up in a somewhat similar way. But we can’t possibly think that this image has just stepped out of the Renoir painting; precisely in being comparable to the latter, it has lost the possibility of seeming like it. While the mystificatory tact of allusion made Bonnie look “right” in her beret, the bald precision of reference gives this conjecturally Renoiresque image of Marianne a sharply defined inconsistency. Moreover, though many are the tricks and devices of Godard’s style, they all work at the single task of making every cinematic image likewise incongruous, dissonant. A Godard image may be at odds with the music accompanying it, the dialogue spoken in it, or the quotation delivered over it; may run contrary to how narrative function and cinematic convention lead us to envision it; may diverge from the other images that it precedes, follows, includes, or imitates; may do all these things at once. But it is always a strikingly ill-suited thing. And this overall style of mismatching is itself strikingly ill suited to our attention, which, with equal abruptness, it at once summons and refuses to sustain.

By some reckonings, Pierrot marks the moment where Godard “goes bad,” and by others, where his style, whose distinctive features had emerged long before, achieves its first fully rigorous statement. It is both these things because Godard here no longer puts up much resistance to the corrosive implications of this style for what had been his favorite subject (the romantic couple) and his favorite set of forms (the Hollywood genres). Adorable in Breathless (1959), irresistible in A Woman Is a Woman (1961), “fatal” in Contempt (1963), the couple in Pierrot enjoys only the charm of the fading. A mundane way of putting Godard’s famous claim that his Marianne and Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) are “the last romantic couple” is to say that they are, from the very beginning, at the end of the line, where all their effort to be the romantic couple is balked or unproductive. They are never seen even to accomplish the copulation that is the couple’s crown in Bonnie, much less to hold together on any ideal or spiritual plane. More tiresome than poignant, their failing condition persists until the day they die—and even then, unlike every other couple on the run, they don’t die together. Pierrot’s couple runs not like Bonnie’s, to its apotheosis in legend, but only like a stocking, as part of its own unraveling. The story of course unravels with it, on the application of the same inconsistency principle. “I didn’t pre-think it,” Godard rather proudly told Cahiers du cinéma; “it was a completely spontaneous film,” written, edited, mixed as he went along. We don’t doubt his sincerity here, but neither do we appreciate the film’s perfunctory and confusing narrative construction. Released from the thrall of Couple and Genre, Pierrot deprives us of conventional mnemonics to remember it by.

Yet the profoundly unmemorable freshness of Pierrot derives from more than just these deficiencies of content and form. Consider what Samuel Fuller, playing himself, says early on when Ferdinand asks him just what exactly cinema is: “A film is like a battleground. It’s Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word, emotions.” Those who quote this one word as gospel must have, like me, forgotten ever seeing Pierrot, for who that had remembered could think of “emotions” as anything but bad subtitling for a film that doesn’t depict or induce any? Love, hate? Between this nonchalant couple, they are hard to find, still harder to feel. Violence, death? But these are hardly emotions, and in any case are too factitiously presented, with blood by Mondrian, to grip us; the protagonists themselves seem unfazed by the corpses dropped their way. In any case, the inscrutable Fuller, his eyes covered in dark glasses, has made the very driest case for emotions, and the burp-like brevity of even Ferdinand’s response—“ah!”—seems to equate understanding with dismissal. All we see in either man is a nonplussed surface that may or may not be concealing anything deeper down. Not by chance does the only thing on which Marianne and Ferdinand ever agree prove to be this expressionless quality of the visual image, which, as they both separately claim, never reveals anything about a subject’s interiority, even that it exists. In this, unlike Fuller on emotions, they are truly speaking for Pierrot’s maker. Devoid of expression, of desire and the affect around it, Godard’s images deny us any hospitable site from which we might imagine them—deepen them with desire or affect of our own. They put us in the depressive position of “having eyes bigger than our stomachs,” of having to keep confronting what, libidinally speaking, we can’t take in. Existing only in an imaginary sostenuto that Godard never gives, emotion is precisely what his cinema will not let us visualize.

Take, for example, from chapter 17, the long, slow pan that begins following Ferdinand as he walks desultorily along the railway tracks. We hear a train whistle; he sits down between the rails. He buttons his jacket, looks up, then down. We hear another, longer whistle. The train approaches, Ferdinand gets off the tracks; it passes and he walks on. On the basis of this shot, Criterion has called chapter 17 “Despair.” But this is only more bad subtitling, willfully reading “into” the shot so as to restore the melodramatic emotionality that everything about it is rendering moot. It is equally false to say, as does Peter Whitehead in the screenplay’s English translation, that Ferdinand “staggers up” “at the last minute” and “just escapes” being hit by the train. Much as the equanimity with which Ferdinand installs himself on the tracks indicates less despair than a lightly worn apathy, so the unpanicked ease with which he gets up and off them suggests that his putative suicide attempt is no more than an idle game he perhaps already knows how to play. His disconsolate words (“ah, what a terrible five o’clock in the afternoon! The blood, I don’t want to see it”) echo lines from a famous elegy by García Lorca for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías, a bullfighter fatally gored in the ring; but the corrida is a self-canceling signifier: along with the ennobled ghost of Mejías, Godard’s reference calls up Disney’s silly cartoon bull, also called Ferdinand and remarkable for sitting down. At all events, the borrowed verses submit to the same erratic treatment as any other citation in Godard, first repeated, then inverted, finally cut off in medias res—right after the “ah,” in fact, as if the plug had been pulled on the audio—death by technological failure—or as if we were again hearing Ferdinand’s curtly non-absorptive response to Fuller on emotions.

From the early silents on, fiction cinema has loved elaborating the fearful danger of being run over by a train; but Godard seems to evoke this classic thrilling situation only to have us observe his methodically cool rendering of it. He avoids the usual sympathetic close-ups and suspenseful cross-cutting; he even, for once in Pierrot, abates the assault of primary colors, as if unwilling to risk, in such a context, hitchhiking on their visual intensity. In the most perverse touch of all, he entrusts the process of glaciation to a long crane shot, the very shot that he has inherited from Mizoguchi and Hitchcock as the privileged vessel of sustained emotion. Now, no longer justifying its movement in the character’s literal and emotional rush, which in any case is lacking here, the camera moves as desultorily as does Ferdinand. There could hardly be a blunter negation of the cinema of emotions, or a more thorough abolition of its sense of dramatic event. If Ferdinand had died here, would much feel changed? His corpse would only lie there in its pool of red paint like the others before it; at best it might prompt us to repeat what would have become his last word: that very unsatisfactory “ah.” What would happen, in other words, is not very different from what does happen at the end of Pierrot, when Ferdinand wants to blow himself up, changes his mind, but then blows up anyway: “I see” is all the response we can muster.

But suppose that Godard were imaging here emotion of a different sort from the imaginary emotions of a story. I have just said that the absence of parallel montage in the treatment is a refusal to develop the emotion—call it “a fear of death”—conventionally implied in the fictional situation; but it may be doing something else besides. Think how much André Bazin admired the shot in Where No Vultures Fly (1951) where a child who has picked up a lion cub is shown in the same frame with, in one direction, the lioness in search of that cub and, in the other, the parents in search of that child. This single frame, Bazin affirms, “in which trickery is out of the question,” puts the characters in a real situation and gives the story the authenticity of a real event; as such, it “carries us at once to the heights of cinematographic emotion.” In Godard’s shot, likewise “without trickery,” one sees that there must have been a possibility—surely minimized, but nonetheless irremovably genuine—that Belmondo would be run over by the train. Godard no doubt trusted his star, whose athleticism is on triumphant display throughout Pierrot, to decamp on cue, but it is startling to imagine—no, not to imagine, that is the point, but simply to see—the deadly, vital risk that must have been taken. Yet whereas, for Bazin, such “cinematic emotion” serves to legitimate and even magnify the imaginary narrative emotions by grounding them in bona fide reality, in Godard here, the cinematic emotion neither reinforces ordinary emotion, nor feels anything like it. For if the film-story always unfolds in the present tense, the film-making, by the time we see any of it, is always over; Pierrot’s shot simultaneously informs us that, while Ferdinand may be in danger, Belmondo can only have been so. What the strange and disorienting absence of intensity in his performance here makes us confront is the dispiriting weirdness of cinematic emotion. At this moment of real danger, we are at last in the presence of some vestige of “real emotion,” but it is as if we have—as we always will—come upon it too late to appropriate it, to feel with it. No wonder Pierrot is unmemorable: how can we remember an emotion about which we know nothing but that it must have taken place?